Welcome everybody to the Q1 report results. My name is Frank Schuil. I'm co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Safello. Here joined by Johan Edin.
Hi, Johan Edin, Chief Financial Officer.
Let's get the presentation here for everyone to join in. If you have any questions, please leave it in the comments and we'll get to it. So here we go. These are the key events for the first quarter. The biggest one is the Letter of Intent that we signed with Avanza. Avanza, for who don't know, Avanza is a bank that has more than 1.7 million users, a trading platform in stocks, equities, and all kinds of other trading capabilities. We have signed an Letter of Intent to explore serving them with a Crypto-as-a-Service offering, which is also the announcement that we make for our new offering that we're looking to target financial institutions with.
We are seeing an increased demand off the back of this Letter of Intent, which has been great, and we hope to announce more news in the coming period. We launched the integration with Divly, a tech solution. For our user base, which is predominantly Swedish, or entirely Swedish I must say, now 268,000 users, we wanted to make it easy and convenient to declare their taxes just before tax season, which was just in May.
Frank
We managed to integrate with Divly. Sorry, somebody has a hand-
Frank
up.
Johan, I think we can't see your screen.
Okay.
There we go.
There we go. Yeah, I thought I had it. There we go. Can you see it now? Please confirm.
Yes.
All right.
It's-
Everybody could hear me, I presume. Yes? You guys can hear me?
We can hear you, Frank.
Okay. All right. We've done an integration with Divly, that's divly.com. You can find it on our website, safello.com, and we have a section now that we added on taxation. Divly is deeply integrated, so it's very convenient. We also have an affiliate partnership with Koinly, another crypto tax solution. It's really, Divly was a great example of how third parties can integrate against our APIs to be able to have a distribution to our user base. On the one hand, the Crypto-as-a-Service offering is a great way to distribute our capabilities, which includes custody, crypto trading capabilities and so on, to financial institutions and other partners via our API platform.
On the other hand, this is an example where there's an integration where we allow third parties to connect to our distribution of users that we have. It's a bidirectional setup, which is interesting. The third key thing that we did, we changed the fee structure, actually to have it a volume-based standardization across the board, moving away from kind of custom pricing. This actually increased our gross margin, if I'm not mistaken. That's Johan Edin can comment on. If we look at the-
So-
Johan, sorry.
Just sorry to interrupt again, but could you share it without the full screen mode? We think that's better.
Okay. Sure. All right. Sorry. It's not working? Yeah. So I'll go to the next slide then, and hopefully everybody can see that. Apologies for the technical difficulties. It seems to be rampant today. It wasn't the IT. We had the same issue. Anyway, we did grow our user base by 7%. We saw an increase in the order amount, and we saw an increase of volume by 13%. When in doubt, and it goes for the crypto market as well, zoom out. We can see that we've been on a steady growth trajectory since we repositioned ourselves in 2018, and we really found a product market fit.
Looking at, you know, the relative growth to last year, we still saw an increase, whereas Q1 last year was definitely a hot market. Overall I think a great quarter still for us, considering the market conditions, also considering that we've been pushing the envelope not only on our own product offering with our applications and being the market leader there, but also pushing ahead with a completely new product offering with crypto as a service that is in development. With that, I think it's worth spending a couple of minutes on the market sentiment, where I can share a little bit the market.
Let me have a quick overview of the market picture, to comment first on the overall market. If we're looking at the market today, it's $1.3 trillion market cap, all cryptocurrencies combined, over 19,000 different cryptocurrencies that they are tracking. We then look at Bitcoin, and we saw obviously this crash that recently happened on the back of the UST news. For those who have been following news, it's a cryptocurrency called Luna, and they created a stablecoin that uses Luna, the underlying cryptocurrency, as a peg. Financial parties took advantage of that.
It was an algorithmic stablecoin, as it's called, and they poked holes in it, and as a result, there was a complete collapse of the UST Terra stablecoin. As a result, also the Terra cryptocurrency went basically to zero because it started printing new cryptocurrency. Now, to put that in historical perspective, we've seen these type of events before, and I mentioned it earlier this morning on the ITV, that we've seen similar kind of collapses with, for instance, Mt. Gox in 2014 when the platform broke down and 80% of the volume in the market kind of had to move elsewhere. What we saw in that case was that the infrastructure hardened across the industry. The same case same is essentially true here.
Algorithmic stablecoins will probably either have to reimagine how they work because it was also affecting Algorand. For cryptocurrency, the other stablecoins that have actual dollar backing, they were able to prove themselves to continue to maintain the peg, as was the case with USD, USDC, which is a cryptocurrency stablecoin backed by Circle, the US-based cryptocurrency company. Looking at the wider effect of the market, you know, the classic story of when in doubt, zoom out still applies to Bitcoin. We're still above the peak of 2017 was around, well it's not clearly visible here. It was about $20,000.
There's obviously no certainty that we will find our way up already, but I think the biggest scare if I look at the sentiment of the market has been sort of taken into account now with this collapse of Terra, Luna. We'll be seeing what's happening this year. If you look historically, prolonged bear markets can be the case, and that's where obviously people are building new products. In our case, I think it only supports our effort to focus on our Crypto-as-a-Service model, which is a SaaS business more than being entirely reliant on volatility, which obviously could go down in a bear market as well. With that said, I think I would like to hand it over to Johan for the second part of the presentation.
I think we have plenty of questions that we hopefully can get into as well. I will share my screen in the same way that I did before. One second. There we go. Johan, over to you.
Thank you, Frank. Just a quick comments on the numbers. In the first quarter, we saw around 65,000 orders, just shy, which I think is good and largely in line with where we were in Q4. Registrations continued to tick up, so total registered users is now 268,000. The volume, somewhat lower than Q4, but that's also expected given the turmoil in the markets during the first quarter and that has continued in the second quarter as well. All in all, I think it's a good quarter. Looking at our cumulative turnover since start, we're now at close to SEK 1.8 billion, SEK 1.789 billion. I'd say it was a healthy quarter. If we take the next slide, there's just some highlights. If you can share.
Yeah, doing my best. I was moving it hideaway. Now, there we go.
Turnover was up 5% compared to the very strong first quarter we had last year to SEK 205 million. The gross profit declined by 19% to SEK 8.5 million. That should be seen in the light of lower margins. We've increased our fees back in Q4 last year, and we also adjusted the fee levels during Q1 to a level-based fee structure that we mentioned before. We think this works well, and it's basically a merit-based system. Operating profit before depreciation and amortization was -SEK 3.1 million. We have increased our employee base, so it's mainly driven by costs for staffing up and ramping up ahead of a SaaS model.
We've seen external costs, so lawyers, et cetera, go down quite significantly. We hope to maintain costs at, you know, reasonable levels, particularly external costs. Operating profit or EBIT was a negative SEK 4 million, compared to a profit of SEK 800,000 last year. Again, impacted by the same things as I mentioned for the EBITDA. I do think we have a healthy cash balance. We saw a negative cash flow in the quarter of SEK 3.7 million. We still have SEK 28 million in cash. In addition, we hold SEK 10 million as a long-term investment in crypto.
Obviously with the recent weeks' events, we've seen that decrease a bit, but it's still held at cost in the balance sheet, and we need to look at that as we conclude the second quarter, where the markets are. In addition, we also hold some liquidity at liquidity providers, so I will show that in the next slide. In all, I'd say we are focused on building our Crypto-as-a-Service offering, and we see that as an opportunity for 2022 and going forward. Again, to reiterate, our primary focus remains to retain our position in the Swedish market and capture the Crypto-as-a-Service opportunity at an accelerated pace going forward. We take the next slides.
Yeah, so here you see the quarterly cash balance. Including the cash held at exchanges, that's around SEK 31 million plus the SEK 10 million we have in crypto. I'd say we still have a good balance there. If we take the next slide, Frank. Not too much to comment on, apart from what's already been said. Again, personnel expenses have increased, but we've also reached a level where we have, I'd say, critical mass in most functions. We have substantially improved our development capacity. We feel that's good, and we're also preparing the organization for increased volumes in all areas. Yeah, I think we can take the next slide. Here I already mentioned the cash and bank balances.
Of course, it as long as we have a cost base in the form of employees that is high, but we also see that this opportunity going forward is important and a way to grow the business. That's why it looks as it looks. Next slide, cash flow. I think I already mentioned the cash flow for the period, -SEK 3.7 million. It is what it is, and we're looking forward to rolling out our Crypto-as-a-Service offering. You can take the next. That concludes the presentation.
All right. Right. All right, cool. Yes, I think with that we can go to some questions. Mark, could you talk a little bit about your long-term ambition with the Crypto-as-a-Service concept? Where do you see competition come from, and how are you going to onboard more financial institutions? Yeah, that's a great question. Starting with our long-term ambition, we really see. Maybe I can find this slide, another slide on this, because we've had. Let me quickly see if I can find it here. Yes. Let me try to share this particular slide with you, because I think it gives a good view on how we view this opportunity and what dimensions this sits under.
I hope I can see it in full screen. Can you see the full screen slide now?
Not yet.
How about now?
No.
All right. Sorry about that. I'll hide the view.
Oh, there we go, I guess. Yeah.
I think when we're looking at the crypto as a service offering, it's good to understand that there are infrastructure players in the market today, and some of them have obviously been around for a longer time. You know, if you look at, for instance, Paxos internationally, they've partnered up with PayPal, and they've done some interesting integrations. There are other platforms out there that provide just the technology infrastructure for financial institutions.
Now, what is different about how we're positioning is that we're actually looking at de-risking the crypto entry for the end customer, in this case a financial institution, which doesn't go only in the technology part, which obviously we have the custody, liquidity, payment methods, and the trading capabilities. It's also around the governance model, the risk management, really taking all the parts of the operating of the cryptocurrency business, without having to require your own registration, your own support teams on understanding sort of the crypto forensics on the compliance side.
All those capabilities that certainly don't exist within most financial institutions that we're engaging with, that we can take care of. The way we're looking at this model, obviously in the best case scenario, we have deep integration across all these functionalities with, let's say, a bank, let's say an Avanza. But there is also the opportunity to take part of these capabilities and package them up separately, to be able to offer that, to whatever this financial institution might need, which in certain cases might be custody, in other cases might be trading functionality, and a third might actually only want to be interested in understanding the compliance part.
There are different ways of packaging this up, but it's really helping these, you know, over 6,000 banks, and it's not exclusive to financial institutions. That's just where we see this urgent need for them to get into this market and where we see the biggest need so far, but it's not limited to financial institutions. Under the MiCA regulations, if you just talk about Europe alone, there's more than 6,000 banks, and that, you know, is just banks. If you're talking about wealth managers, other types of financial institutions, that segment becomes much larger.
When we look at API capabilities and look at Safello Business, obviously we see already now a lot of interest from the gaming sector, being able to have safe custody for NFTs and things like that. We see a broader solution for what we're creating here. I think the competition is very much about the real ability to completely de-risk it as a third-party organization that partners with us, so they don't need to have their own capabilities in-house, which, you know, that's exactly why we've come as far as we have with the discussions we have today. I just wanted to share that slide, and then I'll go back. There we go. Hopefully that answers your question.
Were there any more questions? Yes. Next one: Do you plan on hiring more FTEs for this specifically, or are you well-staffed enough, even if, for example, the Avanza part comes into fruition? I think Johan answered it. We already staffed up to be able to have the capabilities. I think some operational hiring might be connected to commercial agreements that we sign with third parties. We were, you know, the way we built the platform is obviously that a lot of it is automated, and a lot of the sort of development work, we've already staffed up for to be able to develop it.
The API infrastructure for this potential partnership will also be serving the Safello apps that we have today, to put that kind of in perspective in how we're building the infrastructure on the back of this. Johan, anything to add from your perspective or?
No, I think you summed it up well, Frank. No immediate adjustments. Again, we have critical mass in most functions, I would say.
What is your take on your current fee structure and the balance between keeping a relatively good rate for your own profitability sake and lower it to potentially drive more volume? Johan, you wanna take this?
Sure, Frank. Well, I'd say we're quite happy with the fee structure that we currently have. It's sort of related to the volume that we see, right? If we were to substantially lower fees, we may or may not see increased volumes. I think it's a balance, and we're quite happy with the model we have right now. Of course, that may change, and we monitor the market and try to stay competitive. I think that's roughly what we can say.
Yeah, I can add some historical context to that. Historically, if you look at the price elasticity between a brokerage model, which is what we have, versus, for instance, an order book exchange, then certainly with an order book exchange, it really quickly goes to zero. As kind of the tipping point is there, I guess, below, like, kind of 1%, where the behavior starts changing, but it also requires then real-time capability in the order book.
For the brokerage model, and historically we've tested that, and of course, the market has changed, and the market continually change, but it's not as price sensitive as one would expect, as has been demonstrated by some of our competitors that have been charging ridiculous sums and have not been out of business yet. There is certainly price pressure, and I think that will continue. As the adoption of financial institutions happens, it is obviously going to be more price pressure and it depends also, of course, on the functionality.
The way we can look at that model is that the brokerage model would effectively become a deposit withdrawal type of function, where you have then the trading volume moving potentially to an order book type of platform, or at least that capabilities where you could experiment with different pricing models. For us, the long-term view is, of course, that we have high confidence in our Crypto-as-a-Service offering, where Safello effectively can focus on becoming a SaaS business. Hopefully, I didn't say too much, Johan, but you can push back if you think I said anything that is not correct. Anything to add, Johan, or fair enough?
No.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
All right. Let's move to the next question then. Mark is on a roll today. How do you view long-term price pressure? The gross margin move, I guess, is price, quite similar discussion. Johan, do you wanna comment on that?
No. I mean, it's quite natural. We've lowered the highest fees, and we've made it a more egalitarian pricing model if you like. Yeah, we'll see. If we get bigger clients and then more active clients, then obviously the margins would move down, or if we adjust the overall levels in the coming year.
It's also looking at lifetime value of a customer, where I think the lifetime value is actually quite a long relationship that we have with the customer that sometimes leave in a bear market, but they come back in a bull market to either buy or sell, and it can be years in between.
Separately, I mean, we of course always look at extending the lifetime value of a customer, not only on the current trading fee and the volatility as discussed before, but also in other business models that we still have in on the roadmap on our end to look at, for instance, staking and things like interest-based business models can remove the core of the reliability on just the volatility, which is still the primary income stream today. Next question. How much time do you save making the fee structure automated, and are there other tasks that you aim to automate going forward that gives Safello cost savings? That's a good question.
This particular, like, fee structure automation helps, I think, a significant amount with, from an FTE perspective, on the pricing, and the customized pricing that we had in the organization. Yeah, other tasks that you aim to automate. Yeah, I mean, we're constantly looking at automation and, particularly Safello Business, we think we can improve quite a bit, and we're looking into that more deeply, as we speak to see how we can enhance the automation around that product, where I think also the onboarding, then for corporations to hopefully the timeline with that could be significantly reduced, at which point the profitability of a single business customer goes up, significantly as well.
Johan, any other thoughts on this question? I think it's a good question.
No, we are clearly working on it, and I think it could improve the user experience as well, particularly for corporates. I think you've given a good answer, Frank.
Okay. Next one. Mark. He's definitely on a roll. Could you briefly touch upon how the frozen crypto market has affected your customers' behavior in Q1, and perhaps in April, beginning of May? I'll pass this on to Johan as well.
Well, thank you. I think it's illustrated by the volumes that we've seen. If you look internationally as well, I think Coinbase was down quite significantly in Q1 in terms of volumes, whereas we've actually almost managed or maintained it versus Q1 last year and almost staying at Q4 levels. That's for the first quarter. Of course, I'd say in general terms, we haven't seen any major shift in the recent past. However, if this crypto turmoil continues, it may, of course, affect volumes. I wouldn't say we've seen anything dramatic so far.
No, I think historically, we do see summer months, and I think we've disclosed that in our prospects that there is some seasonality to the volume. Summer, you know, July, June, July, can be significantly less. At the same time, we've seen the opposite as well. Especially when there is a bear sentiment prior to summer, it could be the other way around. It's really hard to put a finger kind of on what the short term kind of volume is looking like. I think, you know, I think the first quarter at least shows that it's not a complete collapse of the market or anything like that, if that's kind of behind your question.
We obviously see similar, like the growth number, we went from 250,000 users, 268,000 users, if I'm not mistaken, in the last reported number, Johan. Yeah. Okay. Next one. How do you decide on which new cryptocurrencies to offer on your platform going forward, and how do you avoid blowups such as Luna? I think that's a very fair question. We've always stated that we have a framework by which we assess the suitability for cryptocurrency and add into our platform or not. To be clear, Luna is not a supported cryptocurrency by Safello. This we look at from different dimensions.
First off, we have kind of a framework that we communicated to the regulator on what type of cryptocurrencies and which ones we are looking to offer. Then another dimension is like our partners and that we work with in order to be able to integrate it effectively. Then there's the third dimension of the assessment, which really goes into, you know, what is the suitability in terms of market size, which in this case, LUNA would have cleared because I think the market cap was about $60 billion. But then you need to, of course, monitor what kind of things are happening with the cryptocurrency, how mature is it, what kind of issues that might arise.
The reality is that cryptocurrency market is still, you know, some of the newer cryptocurrencies, there's a huge customer demand for it, are sometimes in their, you know, early stages of their life cycle. Which means that there can be issues, there's always that chance. In LUNA's case, you know, when they created UST, U.S. Terra, sorry, it was clear that it was a big financial experiment. For those who've been following the crypto market, it was a very bold move by its founder Do Kwon to create this. Of course, there have been stablecoins like DAI that seemingly were performing fine.
I think the way this was structured did see some red flags in the market that, you know, there was a coordinated effort to take advantage of that. I mean, it was a multi-billion kind of effort to do to USDT what happened to UST and LUNA. I think it really is about that framework that we follow, and I mean, this is a great reminder that that's why we have that framework and why we need to stay vigilant to protect our customers to the best of our ability. At the end of the day, of course, customers, we always encourage them to do their own research. That's what we say first and foremost, and really try to understand what they invest in.
Yeah, I hope that provides some clarification. Oh, that was it. Were those all the questions? Yeah. Okay. All right. Any more questions? I'm looking. No, I don't think so. Jo? Any
No
Parting thoughts? Well, we look forward to another chat. No more. Okay. Well, thank everybody for tuning in, and for Mark particularly for your great questions. You're winning it today. Johan, thank you. We look forward to see you for the next quarterly update. Thanks everybody.
Thank you.